Between Silk and Cyanide (36 page)

'You realize how much work that would involve?'

'Yes, Commander.'

'And you'd be prepared to take it on?'

'Yes, Commander.'

He took a deep breath. The ozone was comparatively clear as my cigar was unlit. 'They're produced at Oxford by Commander Hogg. He supplies SOE's figure pads—Dansey knows the details.'

'Thank you, Commander.'

'You'll have to make an appointment with him through the head of SOE—and Nick should have a word with him in advance.'

'Thank you, Commander.'

He glanced at his watch. 'God—I must go.'

To forewarn Hogg?

We both stood up. In his case it showed.

He thanked me for the sandwiches, and reminded me of Tiltman's invitation to visit Bletchley. He then held out his hand as if I were no longer a stowaway on a coding flagship. 'I agree with you that the poem-code is shit, and I want to help you to replace it if I possibly can! I hope you know that.'

'Thank you. Commander. I do.'

And meant it…

And to help me continue meaning it if he were forced to be obstructive I encoded a reminder to myself on a letter one-time pad: VIVAT DUDLY-SMITH.

It took me two minutes and twenty seconds.

Oxford had a variety of irresistible attractions. It was sixty-five miles from Baker Street, every one of them a continent. It had yet to be troubled by air raids (I was one of the few sandbags in sight), and it had managed to retain so much of its awesome presence that the GI visitors who swarmed across the cobblestones allowed the spires to do the strutting. Above all, it was the home of the Bodleian Library, which was not only the shire's soul, and one of the main reasons for resisting invasion, but was allowed six months' credit by 84.

Yet the feature of Oxford which transformed it into an English Lourdes was unknown to all but a privileged few.

It produced letter one-time pads.

Commander Hogg's office was on the first floor of a large country house which had been taken over for official purposes with no obvious signs of desecration.

There were no obvious signs of a welcome either.

The commander rose from his desk, took my pass from me and examined it as if it were written in code. He was middle-aged, greyhaired, with none of Dudley-Smith's elegance but all of his authority. The quality of his product was reflected in his face, which was impossible to read on a depth of one.

Something about my pass seemed to be troubling him, and he put on his glasses for a second reading.

It was an uncomfortable start to a critical meeting for which I was inadequately briefed. I knew nothing about this inscrutable man except that he was a purveyor of one-time pads to the nation of which SOE believed itself a part.

The first words he addressed to me weren't so much clipped as stapled together.

'Is it Marks with an "x".?'

Dear God, one of those.
'Not according to my birth certificate or my great-grandfather's! May I ask if it's Hogg with one "g"!?'

There was a short pause during which the room was filled with stimulating throb of mutual antipathy. He then invited me to sit down, and brusquely informed me that he'd been asked by the head S.O.E. to supply us with letter one-time pads, and to discuss the details in the course of our meeting.

He looked at me with a 'torpedoes away' expression. 'I'm still not sure what you people do.'

'The Germans, sir. In every way we can.'

I was absolutely certain that Captain Bligh didn't need a briefing from Fletcher unChristian about SOE or any other wartime anomaly. But I needed one about him. There must be some reason for his hostility other than good taste.

'Who recommended letter-pads to SOE?'

I admitted responsibility.

'What experience have you had with them?'

'None, sir.'

He said 'Good God' so softly that unless the Almighty were in the with us, of which there was increasingly little sign, he couldn't expect much feed-back from the supreme crow's nest.

'Can I assume you know how they work?'

I said that I believed I did; and he pounced at once: 'Who explained them to you?'

I daren't admit that until very recently I thought I'd invented them.

'Dansey, sir. He used to be in charge of agents' codes.'

His expression said, 'It's a pity he still isn't.'

'Do you usually recommend coding systems you know nothing about?'

'No, Commander. But I rarely hear of any as good as LOPs.'

He winced at the word. And continued wincing while I explained why letter-pads were ideally suited for agents' traffic. He waited until I'd finished the litany, then looked at me as if my bilges were leaking. (One of them was.) 'Tell me Marks, what other codes have you recommended to SOE?'

I gave him a thorough WOK-ing, and he suddenly brightened.

'That idea sounds secure and practical. Who devised it?'

I admitted paternity, which seemed to surprise him.

'Commander, may I give you two examples of why letter-pads would be better?'

Without waiting for permission, I told him about the Norwegians who reported the movements of German battleships to London while surrounded by the enemy, and about the agents who attacked submarines with limpets, who also reported to London. The information the Admiralty was waiting for could have been transmitted in less than fifty letters, had the codes been safe enough.

Hogg couldn't quite hide a smile at these nautical disclosures and assured me that he'd taken my point that agents must get off the air in the shortest possible time. But he was afraid that letter-pads were unlikely to be the answer.

'Why not. Commander?'

I was disconcerted by his softly spoken reply. 'I think you'd better see one.'

He lifted the receiver, issued a quiet instruction, and asked if I'd like some tea. Scarcely able to breathe, let alone swallow, I declined with thanks.

A door which I hadn't noticed because it was right in front of me opened almost immediately and his Muriel (if there were another such) brought in the first letter one-time pad I'd seen. It was accompanied by a large substitution square.

She put them in front of him, gave me the kind of encouraging smile Muriel bestowed on my long-suffering visitors, and left us alone.

The letter-pad was the most important person in the room. The commander watched me while I paid my respects to it. 'It won't bite you if you pick it up,' he said encouragingly.

But it did.

Home Station to Out was a Caxton first edition, and Outstation to Home was the Gutenberg Bible.

'My God, Commander, they're beautifully produced.'

That was as close to an understatement as I had ever come. The letters were clear and would be easy to read at half their present size. was already back in Baker Street giving my first LOP briefing, and wished the commander would stop asking questions.

'I take it you wouldn't issue them to agents just as they are?'

I shook my head firmly.

'You'd photograph them down and have them reproduced on silk?'

On silk myself, I hardly bothered to nod.

'Then tell me, Marks… where do you propose to get all the silk? And who's going to undertake all that photography?—you must have better sources than I have…'

Oxford's first bomb had just been exploded.

The shock-waves forced me to realize that I hadn't done my homework. He had been expecting me to provide him with details of SOE's production facilities and not my opinion of the merits of his codes.

But what could I say to him?

Joan Dodd's enthusiasm and Elder Wills's inventiveness hardly constituted a production programme, and I'd made no attempt to approach anyone else.

Like an amateur entrepreneur, I'd proceeded on the precarious premiss that what an agent needs an agent must have, and that ways would be found to provide it.

The commander knew that he'd landed on target, and that this was the moment to demolish it completely. 'Don't you realize how many other organizations with greater priority than SOE also need silk? Have you people never heard of parachutes? Has no one told you there's an acute shortage of silk—and of printing facilities—and of skilled photographers?'

I mumbled something about being able to manage with sensitized paper.

'I suppose you're not aware that there's an acute shortage of paper as well?'

And of goodwill to SOE., you supercilious bastard.

'It seems to me you've done no homework whatever and wasted a people's time.'

I looked him in the eye and grudgingly recognized the tiny tic of extreme tiredness.

'Commander, I think there's something you should see.'

I twiddled the knobs on my briefcase (I still didn't know how to open it) and finally produced SOE's version of a letter one-time pad But in my eagerness to show him what our technicians could produce I allowed my briefcase to spill out the remainder of its Top Secret contents. They consisted of six bananas, a selection of Mother's sandwiches and a contraceptive in a plastic container.

Although a bunch of bananas was one of England's rarest sights the commander's expression as he gazed at the contraceptive was rarer still, and I hastily explained that it had arrived on my desk earlier that morning with a note from the head of special devices suggesting that 'a contraceptive made of local rubber would be excellent camouflage for a microfilmed code'.

The now rigid commander murmured 'Dear God', and once again received no noticeable response. He then gave his considered opinion of Elder Wills's special device. It was an example of inventiveness for the sake of it, had no practical application to clandestine communications as he understood them, and was a waste of manpower and material—amateurishness at its worst.

Quite wrong. Out of all this amateurishness came Elder Wills's magic.

The commander's hand strayed towards the buzzer.

I pushed the home-made pad towards him.

He glanced at it perfunctorily, realized what it was and started examining it with growing interest.

I slid the contraceptive back into my briefcase as I had no immediate use for it.

The commander looked at me sharply. 'Where did you get this pad?'

I owned up to my fantasy that I'd invented the system and told him that this mocked-up pad was the product of our service departments.

'How long did it take them?'

I admitted that it had taken a fortnight, including Sundays.

'But it's only three pages long. Still, it's a good effort considering it's not machine-made—but I doubt if these letters are truly random, They were as random as three bored FANY counter-shufflers could make them.

'Now then. Marks—' His next volley of questions, his deadliest yet, concerned the statistics I should have prepared.

'How many letter pads would be needed over the next few his… ? What were their dimensions… ? How much silk would be required… ? How much paper… ? Had I told the service departments the size of the commitment they would be faced with… ? Did I know it myself… ? Had I worked out my time-scale… ? Had I made allowances for the service departments' mistakes—they didn't alway's get things right the first time… I And had I… ? And had I… And had I…?

The answer to everything was that I hadn't.

He said that he often reminded his own young people that enthusiasm was no substitute for homework—and this was particularly true in my case if I wanted letter pads for agents.

He glanced at his watch, and I stood up at once. 'Thanks for your advice Commander, I promise it won't be wasted. And I apologize for coming to you prematurely. Do I need that pass to get out?'

He was examining our letter pad again and didn't seem to hear. He looked up and saw me standing there with my hand out. 'Sit down and listen to me.'

I was back in place before he could blink.

simply can't afford to waste a single letter pad. Nor can we afford to change their format to suit SOE. But I'll tell you what I am prepared to do… Tomorrow I'm sending figure pads to Dansey and I'll include some letter pads with 'em—use them sensibly. Show them to those people who might be able to reproduce them—never rely on their imagination; they must see what you're talking about make sure they're security-vetted. Contact me at once if you have success—and I'll see what I can do. Will that be a help to you?'

'More than that. Commander.'

'Very well then, we'll leave it at that.' He stood up, and returned the pass to me. 'I doubt if you've got a hope in hell's chance of getting of getting sufficient silk—but good luck to you.'

He shook my hand, signed my pass, and a few lifetimes later Marks with a 'k' and his briefcase with a condom landed in Baker Street to start a crusade.

The difficulties of supplying silk codes to all our Signals dependencies were greater than even Hogg had foreseen.

The poem-code had become a worldwide malignancy, and to send WOKs and LOPs to Cairo, India and Burma—whose agents needed them just as badly as their European counterparts—enough silk would be needed for at least 40 million code-groups.

It was my job to find it, and not for the first time since joining SOE I wished that there were some substance in the most enduring of all myths: that the chosen people have direct access to everything in short supply with the possible exception of tolerance. As it was I had no ideas, no contacts, and no option but to join the long queue of mendicants waiting for SOE's Supply directorate to live up to its job description.

I was luckier than most because my rejection was immediate. None of the Supply departments (there were four main ones) could undertake a commitment of this size, even if its priority was as high as I maintained. Nor did they know of anyone who could.

Once again I turned to Joan Dodd, whose official position as head of the stationery department was the biggest misnomer in Baker Street. But this time she called in the head of her directorate. Major Ince, to help me get my thinking right. As they saw it, the solution to mass-producing silk codes, each of which had to be different, lay in a combination of printing and photography, and much would depend on the inventiveness of the technicians involved.